K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Bend to the will of the universe: freesweep

There are powerful forces at work in nature. There are things about life I just don’t understand or comprehend, and one of them is the appeal of Minesweeper.

I might be the last remaining person on the planet over whom this game holds absolutely no sway. I find it dull, uninteresting and terrifically mind-numbing.

But I can’t ignore its history or influence, even if I have probably spent the entire sum of eight minutes of my life actually playing the game. Part of those eight minutes includes this:

I consider it my responsibility to inform you of analogues between popular parts of graphical computing, and life at the console.

So for those of you who wouldn’t consider jumping to a text-only lifestyle because you can’t live without Minesweeper, well, you don’t have an excuse any more.

In fact, freesweep might be an even greater challenge, considering that the game will scale itself to whatever dimension you want. It’s clever enough to scroll over borders, meaning your minefield can stretch far beyond the limits of your screen.

And it has color. And it’s easy to configure. And it’s hardly a drag on system resources; what you see there was quite speedy at 120Mhz, running under Debian.

So for those of you who were desperately clutching at a graphical environment because the indomitable ebb and flow of the universe demand that you play Minesweeper … you can still achieve inner peace.